ORACLES: Airborne Cloud and Aerosol Measurements for Climate Science

Three intensive airborne observation periods from 2016 to 2018 collected in situ cloud measurements over the southeast Atlantic. The ORACLES campaign was a five-year investigation designed to study the climate impacts of African biomass burning aerosols, which account for nearly one-third of Earth's total. Its multi-year vertical column observations target key parameters driving aerosol-cloud interactions in a region with large inter-model differences in climate forcing assessments.

Use Cases

• Validating and improving aerosol-aware climate model simulations based on in situ vertical profile measurements.
• Analyzing the radiative heating impact on cloud properties using data on varying aerosol-cloud layer separations.
• Studying the long-range transport and aging of biomass burning aerosols using model-derived estimates of aerosol time since emission.
• Investigating the seasonal and interannual variability of aerosol-cloud interactions over the southeast Atlantic across three field campaigns.

Strengths

• Provides multi-year airborne observations across three distinct field campaigns from 2016 to 2018.
• Covers the complete vertical column over the southeast Atlantic, a critical region for climate forcing studies.
• Combines in situ aircraft measurements with model-derived data (e.g., aerosol time since emission) for a process-oriented understanding.

Limitations

• Specific column names and data structure are not provided in the available metadata, limiting immediate usability.
• Conflicting or incomplete metadata exists across platforms regarding license, author, and precise data size/row counts.
• The dataset's freshness is unclear; the most recent update is listed as 2026, which may be a placeholder or future date.

Provenance

Source

LARC_ASDC (NASA Langley Research Center Atmospheric Science Data Center)

Collection Method

In situ measurements collected onboard NASA P-3 Orion and ER-2 aircraft, supplemented by model outputs from the WRF-AAM Model.

Time Range

August 19, 2016 – October 27, 2018 (spanning three deployments: 2016, 2017, 2018)

Freshness

2026-04-09 23:25:10.205190

Geography

Southeast Atlantic Ocean region, off the coast of Southern Africa